The air on earth has 21% A oxygen, 78% nitrogen and 1% of other miscellaneous gases. Oxygen in the air is very destructive to the quality of most food. Reducing exposure of oxygen from food is an effective method to preserve its quality before perishing. One of the popular practices of reducing oxygen exposure involves actively extracting air and mainly oxygen from inside an opened bottle. Simply capping or closing the bottle only keeps the air or oxygen already inside to degrade the food quality. Most commonly, bottles of partially consumed wine are capped with stoppers that create a vacuum. The air inside can be vacuumed out using either a manual or powered vacuum pump. The pumped out bottles remain sealed for a short period until their vacuum collapse due to external forces such as change in temperature. While pumping air out will temporarily extend the life of wine in a bottle, trying to vacuum a bottle requires excessive manual force by the user or powered vacuum pumps. Furthermore, each time the bottle is opened, the vacuum is lost and the liquid is mixed substantially with air during the pouring process thus its oxidation is accelerated with each pour event.
An approach of preserving the consumable liquid in a bottle is injection of inert gas such as argon or nitrogen. Nitrogen is preferred for it is more abundance and cheap being an industrial byproduct of oxygen production. Although there are considerable teachings of this method in prior art, none of them offers a practical and easy to use with multiple bottles at the same time. Systems offered by WineKeeper®, Wine Saver®, Wikeeps® and NitroTap® use high-pressure gas to push the wine out of the bottle dispensing it via a tap faucet. This method is expensive and cumbersome since it requires one tap for each bottle. Coravin®, on the other hand, uses thin hollow needle to pressurize and dispense the wine out of the bottle. So it only works with natural and not synthetic cork or screw cap. It pours very slowly at 25 seconds for 5 ounces and its needle is very susceptible to blockage by sediments in older wine. It also requires expensive argon cartridges at the cost approaching $1.00 to pour one average glass of wine. At the other end of the spectrum, Private Preserve®, VineyardFresh® and Presevino® offers gas canisters for injecting a few quick bursts of argon inside the bottle after each pour. Their methods rely on the misconception that argon, being heavier than air, will blanket the wine surface to keep it fresh.